Re-hiring on the rise in Indian companies

AHMEDABAD, AUG 6:“Home-coming” (religious re-conversion) raised a lot of heat and dust in the country’s politics last year, but Indian companies are increasingly welcoming this trend of re-hiring former employees, in what is now also known as ‘boomerang recruitment’ in the corporate world.

And the returnees—the home-comers—often get a hefty pay compensation, too!

Welcome to the brave new corporate world where employees keep in touch with the company they left for “professional reasons”, only to return home on a higher position. Neha Dixit worked as a consultant with niche travel consultancy FlightShop for two-and-a-half years, joined online travel major MakeMyTrip for a few months and returned to FlightShop last year. “I always kept in touch with FlightShop. They approached me, asking “Why don’t you join back.” And I did, getting a 25 per cent pay-hike, and a promotion as Senior Consultant.”

Jitendra Bhatia, a Senior Executive with leading B2B portal TradeIndia.com for three-and-a-half-years, joined CARE, a rating agency, and returned to TradeIndia two months ago. “I shifted both the times for professional reasons, got a 25 per cent hike each time and am now Senior Territory Manager.”

The home-coming, apparently, began with IT and ITeS companies.

IndiaMART, having about 3,000 employees, actually launched a “home-coming project” two years ago, the company disclosed. “We have re-hired nearly 100 former employees since. Every month, we re-hire, on an average, four or five such employees,” Vineeta Tikoo Koul, National HR Head, told BusinessLine. The company usually re-hires those who left a year ago, the average ‘cooling off’ period in boomerang recruitment.

For this, IndiaMART works two ways. “We take out a list of those who left us and approach them again after a year or so. Alternately, they can also reach out to us. After re-joining, they take to work like fish-to-water, from day one, as they are familiar with our work culture and we don’t need to train them,” she said.

The returnees benefit the company as they come with a fresh perspective, additional skills and wider experience. “Typically, we offer no pay hike if the said employee has returned within a year of leaving. For others, we offer a raise of 15-20%, as per industry norms.”

Eco-Rent-A-Car also launched a scheme to identify former employees whose re-hiring could benefit the company. “We don’t encourage all those who left us. But we do have guidelines for those who could return, like the reason for attrition, performance and what the employee was doing then and is doing now,” Nikhil Mathur, HR Head, said. Over a dozen ex-employees have returned to this company since January 2015.

IndiaGiftsPortal.com CEO Rahul Garg said his company, once a subsidiary of IndiaMART, has “very low” rate of attrition and most of its 150 employees, on an average, are working for the last five to six years.

“But we are also re-hiring ex-employees. Nearly 10 of them, who had left six to nine months ago, returned to us recently. We didn’t give them much raise but they returned as they liked our work culture.

“However, some, who returned after a time-frame, say after a year, did get a raise.”